In Black Ink My Love May Still Shine Bright
by Blue-Inked Frost
Summary: Two lovers meet in a bathing cell at the sea goddess' temple. They mark each other with ink and water.


This is a side story to 'Out, Brief Candle'.

—

Kovacs looked up from the bench at the woman who opened the door. He drunk in the sight of her: determined, defiant, roguish, clean and trim and stunning in a dark blue cloak she'd not be planning to wear long.

Pherenike fastened the latch behind her in a sure, graceful movement. Part of his mind, almost without conscious intent, took note of her appearance: soft linen skirts sweeping below her cloak, boots slightly marked by the darker dirt of the cobblestones leading to the docks, no jewellery but the simple bracelet he'd given her, keys clinking in her chatelaine bag, a basket under her arm with fresh towels and the tip of a lacquered box just visible. She'd asked him to slip into this place - into a particular bathing cell at the temple of Umberlee, at this time or else.

Umberlee, goddess of the sea, provided her bathers with a tiled floor and walls, a wide wooden bench, and a tub of healthy saltwater, this particular tub with a defective heating component. The cell was so clean and bare as to be antiseptic and depressing, but it might as well have been as bad as a prison hulk and all he'd worry about in the surroundings was whether she was happy with them.

"Am I playing Madam S. Harkskin, young master Fin Winkle, or Countess Conchita Shell?" Kovacs asked. He'd glimpsed her false names on the registry at the desk; she'd paid and reserved three adjacent rooms. This was the centre cell, the most private.

A pink flush crept into Pherenike's cheeks. "They're foolish names, I know, but Umberlee deals with this sort of thing all the time, at least according to Candle," she said. "Half their business is sailors, the other half illicit lovers and abortions. Using obvious fake names sends a message, you see, that their acolytes aren't to knock on the doors with buckets of towels or complain that not all the renters showed up - and charge a little extra."

She approached him, leaning up for her greeting. Kovacs found a paper rose in her hair and stole the basket from her at the same time. He cupped her chin with a bare hand, tracing the delicate line of her jaw. She smelt of magnolias as she kissed him. Small tendrils of dark hair had already come loose from her queen's braid, clinging to her cheeks in the steam of the bathing house. He helped her unwrap her cloak, fall back on the bench.

She placed the lacquered box in Kovacs' hands. He was slightly surprised to find an inkstone and brushes within; he kept surprise from his face and let imagination whirl. This could be interesting. He delighted in the challenge of keeping up with Pherenike's inventive mind. It was a competition to please the other more, with benefits to losing as well as winning.

Pherenike slipped one fair slender shoulder out of her sleeve. "Turnabout is fair play," she said. "Write on me."

He was very interested.

Kovacs dipped the brush in a pool of ink. He touched it to her cheek, leaving a single droplet of black behind. Then he paused, the stain sinking into the delicate threads of her skin.

He felt uncertain of himself. The last time he drew anything it was the face of a Bhaalspawn conjuror's servant he was hunting down. Maps, wanted-man sketches, battle plans, arcane diagrams - he knew what to do with a piece of charcoal and a roll of parchment, but he'd not drawn for simple pleasure since childhood. He'd not spoil such an invitation as this.

He covered his uncertainty with a question. "Was there ever a tattoo you wanted to get?" he asked her. His own tattoos were forced on him to bind him to his father's will as a slave, but he'd sometimes considered getting an extra marking chosen for himself.

Pherenike mocked the pursed lips and fussy tones of a strict governess. "Tattoos are for sailors, not for young ladies. But I suppose - oh, when I was about fifteen or sixteen - that a dragon would be an interesting symbol. Or maybe a skull. It would have made me look dangerous."

_You _are_ dangerous, whether holding a heavy Shou vase or not_, Kovacs thought.

He sought memory and imagination for the image he needed. Then he fixed the bold outline of a dragon on her cheek. No artist's work, but at least recognisable as _Draco ignis rex_. She reared in flight and pride, willing to rain fire and blood on any who harmed those she held dear. Pherenike closed her eyes and breathed shallowly when the tip of the brush slipped near sooty lashes still darker than the ink. One of the dragon's wings reared up above her eyebrow, tipping on the left of her forehead. "Let it set ... " Kovacs breathed.

Pherenike turned to a bronze mirror set in the tiles. "I like it," she said. Her breathing rose and fell more quickly and there was a new faint flush in her cheeks, mischief glinting in her eyes.

He added a skull in the third-eye position on her forehead; it was not the death-god skull but Black Alaric's pirate flag.

"Dreams of being a freebooter?" he asked.

"There comes a time in everyone's life where one feels the need to tear up the trammels, draw a throat-slitting razor, and run up the black flag," Pherenike said. "But it's not as glamorous as it sounds. There were a group of mudlark children by the docks who always played pirates - in which I was never allowed to join. When I was alone one day, they launched a dishonourable attack, pelted me with mud, and ruined my smock. Imagine a sobbing, bedraggled waif not so much a girl but a walking mud-bath."

"Doubtless that's not the end of the story," Kovacs said.

"My grandfather was an engineer. I sought his advice on structural integrity," Pherenike said. "I waited for a distraction, mounted a rearguard action to the foundations, and toppled the pirates' fort. It's not something I'm proud of nowadays. It was a glorious and mud-soaked day, but my next governess was selected to be much more strict."

Pherenike felt the trammels of a constrained and lonely life, a noble-born girl raised by a succession of governesses and housekeepers. She'd been cared for, but sought more than a limited set of stone walls and a pattern life from dawn to dusk. She desired freedom and discovery.

"Lie back," Kovacs said. He'd had an idea. He captured Pherenike's ankles over his knees. People like her would never walk barefoot; her feet were clean and soft even on the underside, the same colour as the pale pink inside a shell. He dipped the brush in ink again. She twitched, ticklish; he was challenging her to stay still despite the almost irresistible temptation to squirm. She held her position, resolved to match the gauntlet he'd thrown until the end.

The brush drew the last pattern over the sensitive spot on her arched instep.

"You should walk on the stars," Kovacs told her.

He had spanned her feet with an astronomical chart of the skies above the Sea of Swords in winter: the Crown of Horns, Mystra's Hand, the Lovers' Bridge. Two lovers were doomed to remain on opposite sides of the galaxy from each other, but they built a bridge of milky white stars between them and were allowed to cross it once in ten thousand eons. That was not enough; far better to forge ten thousand star swords to bring the unjust heavens down.

A pattern of Sembian fruits and flowers on her left leg, the phases of the moon on her right. He took his time and deliberately allowed himself to get lost in the drawings, all but ignoring the woman below them. With the air starting to chill, Kovacs turned his attention to the defect in the boiler and cast a spell for warmth. Then, leisurely, he sat by Pherenike once more and ran a teasing hand over her stomach, dipping down into the crease of her thigh.

He could tell she was aroused. Let this last as long as possible; the waiting game could be the best part.

Over Pherenike's navel, he drove her to frustration with a delicate, carefully inked diagram of a Halruaan museum he'd been hired to steal from. Their ancestors had stolen a grave urn from the Kuong Kingdom and the family wanted it back. He touched the side of her breast, an assured possession.

"If you're thinking apples, eggs, or pomegranates ... " Pherenike threatened.

"Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies?" Kovacs suggested. "No; perhaps that comparison lost a bit in translation." _Small moons? Alabaster? _he wondered. Also rather cliched.

He reached to her heart, gently cupping her left breast to lift it out of her way. He deliberately let his warm breath trace across her skin. He felt her heartbeat transmitted through the brush to his fingertips, potent and electric and true. The ink traced a confident line across her breastbone.

Pherenike, with her knowledge of symbols, knowledge of the power to set him free, would know what this one was barely after he'd started. Two loops crossing each other, sideways. A double Moebius strip. The symbol was a simple one, one that any child could be taught in a moment. Countless and breathtakingly different histories, civilisations, worlds, arrived at the same mark for the same concept. Kovacs drew the symbol for eternity.

While he breathed, he was hers.

Pherenike's eyes, eyes of quicksilver wit, her studies aimed at this lore like a crane-fletched arrow to a bow, shone with recognition before even he had expected. They didn't need words to speak and be understood by each other.

He painted her breasts with abstract symbols, arcane intersecting ellipsoids and triangles. She arched into his touch, the brush teasing around her pink areolae, dipping down to her sternum and returning to her soft flesh.

"Your back," Kovacs asked. Pherenike rose and turned. She sat straight and poised, lifting her dark cloud of hair from the nape of her neck. Her untouched skin was a canvas; an idea had sprung inside him like a chord of music escaping a long-battered instrument.

He was a monster inside, a dead god's bastard, and sometimes he reached for glistening things, juggling firefly-flecks of glitter above a long dark void. The things that were of no use sometimes let him deceive himself that he had a soul. Song and story, flute and sleight-of-hand, airy paradox and philosophy, the ink of this work. He wanted Pherenike above anything he had ever known, every moment sparking lightning between his skin and her skin. He wanted to create something she would remember in mind and heart and body no matter what became of them. He painted with all the life he had to offer her.

Feathers crossed Pherenike's shoulderblades, glistening black, layered on top of each other like falling rain. Kovacs didn't stop to think, couldn't stop to think. The pen would have faltered and broken if he'd dared stop. He drew sweeping lines of robes flying in a fierce and mighty wind. Wings and arms upraised in the moment of victory. He'd seen the statue he drew immortalised in a Chessentan theatre, a spirit that caught the imagination of anyone whose eyes fell upon her. A group of enslaved men and women stole a ship and from the ship raised a full-fledged fleet, fighting long and hard for their freedom. They'd done more than just win, succeeded in ending slavery in their city-state for all time. The statue was the spirit of their rebellion alighting on their prow - their victory, resistance, and freedom. A winged woman.

_Victory. Pherenike. It's what her name means._

The last drop of ink spilt down the valley of her sacrum. He took a breath he hadn't realised he was holding and looked upon what he had worked.

"Victory and vengeance are both always depicted as women," Kovacs said.

"As alabaster statues on pedestals, cold, lifeless, and moulded to suit the desires of the sculptor," Pherenike returned. She grinned mischievously at him, not meaning to sting. She knew perfectly well that Pherenike-as-obedient-statue was the last idea he would want. "I don't mean you. Show me what you've made of me."

He fished a stage-magic mirror out of his shirt and showed Pherenike herself between two mirrors. "Do you like what you see?"

She examined the winged woman at each angle, with a beaming appraisal of the detail that was more of a compliment than anything she could have said aloud. Then, neither of them willing to wait any longer, she flung herself into his arms. The ink smeared all over her, as they'd both known it would. With tangled limbs and steaming heat and yielding flesh they met each other, the ink smudged in rivulets across bench and tiles and towelling around them.

"You marked me," Pherenike said, lazy and gentle after her first desires were satisfied. The dragon was a black patch over her eye and cheek and the skull a mess of streaks on her forehead. Her thighs were slick with black pools. Kovacs wore a similar dripping pattern on his face and shirt, rising above her and settling around her.

Pherenike touched her fingers to a dark bead on Kovacs' cheek, then laid her hand just under his ear, along the vulnerable curve between head and neck. "I've marked you too."

Thinking of it in those terms Kovacs did not quite like. He had already been marked in a way worse than death. He would rather be unmarked, even if he'd accept a binding to her more readily than any other. Yet it was Pherenike who held the key to those markings as well, and she desired to help him. He lay his freedom in her hands. He lowered his head and kissed her deeply, drawing away the sting.

Their bathing cell grew cold despite all they could do. The bells of the temple chimed and Umberlee's attendants would drive them out unless they gathered clothes together, scrubbed away the black ink as if nothing had happened, left in the opposite direction to each other.

_Victory and vengeance ... and freedom_, Kovacs thought. The knowledge of where he would choose to be filled him. Somewhere inside him was a drawing that couldn't be erased, of a wild defiant woman with a Shou vase in hand, wings and fierce winds rising behind her. He touched the smudge of black she'd left behind.


End file.
